Open Source – Benjamin Kerensahttp://benjaminkerensa.com
The Ramblings of a Beautiful MindSat, 19 Mar 2016 01:13:18 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.126413876Glucosio Named Top Open Source Projecthttp://benjaminkerensa.com/2016/03/18/glucosio-named-top-open-source-project
http://benjaminkerensa.com/2016/03/18/glucosio-named-top-open-source-project#commentsSat, 19 Mar 2016 01:13:18 +0000http://benjaminkerensa.com/?p=3116Last year, I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes and my life was pretty much flipped upside down for awhile. One thing I immediately set out to do was to find software, preferably open source, that would help me get on track and have an improved health outcome.

There was a lot of software out there but I did not find any that aligned with my needs as a person with diabetes. Instead, I found a lot of mobile apps and software built by companies that put profit first and were not driven by the needs of people with diabetes.

Right then I came up with the idea to start an open source project that made cross-platform apps (iOS, Android, Desktop, Web etc) with the focus of improving the health outcomes of people with diabetes and supporting research. But there were already two great open source projects out there like Nightscout and Tidepool, so why start our own?

Simply put, I wanted to do something different as I’ve seen this great divide in the diabetes community where not only are things like communities, podcasts and advocates divided around what type of diabetes a person has, but also the two open source projects out there were focused only on people with Type 1 diabetes. This is problematic because Type 2 diabetes is left outside of these intentional Type 1 diabetes circles when we should be working together to solve both types of diabetes and pooling our resources together to advocate for an end to both types of diabetes.

Glucosio for Android

And so Glucosio was born with the vision that an app was needed that benefits both people with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. Not focusing on one or the other, but instead giving equal energy to features that will benefit both types. Our vision was that this new open source project will unite people who have Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes or know someone who does to contribute to the project and in turn help accelerate research for both types while at the same time helping those with diabetes keep track of things that affect their health outcomes.

Last year was a lot of work for the entire Glucosio team. We worked hard to build awesome open source software for people with Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes and we pulled it off. Glucosio for Android is the first of our diabetes apps you can download today but we also have Glucosio for iOS and Glucosio for Web and an API for researchers that are all being actively worked on.
It is our hope to also have a cross-platform desktop app (OSX, Windows and Linux) in the future as more contributors join to contribute.

Our core team and contributors have much to be proud about reflecting on the work we did in the past few months. While there are many things to be proud of, I think one of the biggest accomplishments was we built an open source project and released a product to Google Play in under four months. We then went on to do four more releases and are growing our user base internationally on a daily basis.

Glucosio for Android

We have had an astounding amount of coveragefrom themedia about the vision we have for Glucosio and how we can use open source software to not only help people with diabetes improve their outcomes but further research through anonymous crowdsourcing.

I’m proud of the work our core team has put in over the past few months and excited what the new year has in store for us as a project. One big change next year is we will be formally be under the leadership of a non-profit foundation (Glucosio Foundation) which should help us be more organized but also have the financial and legal structure we need to grow as a project and deliver on our vision.

I’ve been able to meet and talk with third parties like Dexcom, Nightscout Foundation and many others including individual developers, researchers and other foundations who are very interested in the work we are pioneering and are interested in partnering, supporting or collaborating with Glucosio.

One exciting thing we hope to kick off in the New Year are Diabetes Hack Days, where organizers around the world can host hack days in their community to get people to come together to hack on software and hardware projects that will spur new innovation and creativity around diabetes technology. Most importantly though, we are very excited to launch our API to researchers next year so they can begin extracting anonymized data from our platform to help further their diabetes research.

We also look forward to releasing Glucosio for iOS in the first quarter of 2016 which has had a lot of interest and been under development for a couple months now.

In closing, we would like to invite developers, translators, and anyone else to get in touch and get connected with our project and start contributing to the vision we have of amazing open source software to help people with diabetes. We’d also ask you to consider a donation to the project, which will help us in our launch of our iOS in Q1 of 2016, and help us more rapidly produce features by offering bounties via BountySource and expand into a more mature open source project.

There is clearly great sadness felt in the open source community today after learning of the passing of Ian Murdock who founded the Debian Linux Distribution and was the first Debian Project Leader. Ian is the “ian” in Debian and Deb, his then-girlfriend (Debra Lynn) for those not familiar with the history of the naming of the project.

I was fortunate to meet Ian Murdock some years ago at an early Linux Conference (LinuxWorld) and it was very inspiring to hear him talk about open source and open culture. I feel still today that he was one of the many people who helped shape my own direction and contributions in open source. Ian was very passionate about open source and helped create the bricks (philosophy, vision, governance, practice) that power many open source projects today.

If it were not for Ian, we would not have many of the great Debian forks we have today including the very popular Ubuntu. There is no doubt that the work he did and his contributions to the early days of open source have had an impact across many projects and losing Ian at such a young age is a tragedy.

That said, I think the circumstances around Ian’s death are quite concerning as we have seen the tweets he made. I do hope that if Ian suffered excessive force at the hands of the San Francisco Police Department that justice will eventually be served.

I hope that we can all reflect on the values that Ian championed and the important work that he did and celebrate his contributions, which have had a very large and positive impact on computing.

Thank you Ian!

]]>3106Openly Thankfulhttp://benjaminkerensa.com/2015/11/20/openly-thankful
http://benjaminkerensa.com/2015/11/20/openly-thankful#commentsSat, 21 Nov 2015 01:58:33 +0000http://benjaminkerensa.com/?p=3094So next week has a certain meaning for millions of Americans that we relate to a story of indians and pilgrims gathering to have a meal together. While that story may be distorted from the historical truth, I do think the symbolic holiday we celebrate is important.

That said, I want to name some individuals I am thankful for….

People

Mozillians

Lukas Blakk

I’m thankful for Lukas for being a excellent mentor to me at Mozilla for the last two years she was at Mozilla. Lukas helped me learn skills and have opportunities that many Mozillians would not have the opportunity to do. I’m very grateful for her mentoring, teaching, and her passion to help others, especially those who have less opportunity.

Jeff Beatty

I’m especially thankful for Jeff. This year, out of the blue, he came to me this year and offered to have his university students support an open source project I launched and this has helped us grow our l10n community. I’m also grateful for Jeff’s overall thoughtfulness and my ability to go to him over the last couple of years for advice and feedback.

Majken Connor

I’m thankful for Majken. She is always a very friendly person who is there to welcome people to the Mozilla Community but also I appreciate how outspoken she is. She is willing to share opinions and beliefs she has that add value to conversations and help us think outside the box. No matter how busy she is, she has been a constant in the Mozilla Project. always there to lend advice or listen.

Emma Irwin

I’m thankful for Emma. She does something much different than teaching us how to lead or build community, she teaches us how to participate better and build better participation into open source projects. I appreciate her efforts in teaching future generations the open web and being such a great advocate for participation.

Stormy Peters

I’m thankful for Stormy. She has always been a great leader and it’s been great to work with her on evangelism and event stuff at Mozilla. But even more important than all the work she did at Mozilla, I appreciate all the work she does with various open source nonprofits the committees and boards she serves on or advises that you do not hear about because she does it for the impact.

Ubuntu

Jonathan Riddell

I’m thankful for Jonathan. He has done a lot for Ubuntu, Kubuntu, KDE and the great open source ecosystem over the years. Jonathan has been a devout open source advocate always standing for what is right and unafraid to share his opinion even if it meant disappointment from others.

Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph

I’m thankful for Elizabeth. She has been a good friend, mentor and listener for years now and does so much more than she gets credit for. Elizabeth is welcoming in the multiple open source projects she is involved in and if you contribute to any of those projects you know who she is because of the work she does.

Glucosio

Paolo Rotolo

I’m thankful for our lead Android developer who helps lead our Android development efforts and is a driving force in helping us move forward the vision behind Glucosio and help people around the world. I enjoy near daily if not multiple time a day conversations with him about the technical bits and big picture.

The Core Team + Contributors

I’m very thankful for everyone on the core team and all of our contributors at Glucosio. Without all of you, we would not be what we are today, which is a growing open source project doing amazing work to bring positive change to Diabetes.

Others

Leslie Hawthorne

I’m thankful for Leslie. She is always very helpful for advice on all things open source and especially open source non-profits. I think she helps us all be better human beings. She really is a force of good and perhaps the best friend you can have in open source.

Jono Bacon

I’m thankful for Jono. While we often disagree on things, he always has very useful feedback and has an ocean of community management and leadership experience. I also appreciate Jono’s no bullshit approach to discussions. While it can be rough for some, the cut to the chase approach is sometimes a good thing.

Christie Koehler

I’m thankful for Christie. She has been a great listener over the years I have known her and has been very supportive of community at Mozilla and also inclusion & diversity efforts. Christie is a teacher but also an organizer and in addition to all the things I am thankful for that she did at Mozilla, I also appreciate her efforts locally with Stumptown Syndicate.

]]>http://benjaminkerensa.com/2015/11/20/openly-thankful/feed13094Let’s End the Community Council Entrenchmenthttp://benjaminkerensa.com/2015/11/11/lets-end-the-community-council-entrenchment
http://benjaminkerensa.com/2015/11/11/lets-end-the-community-council-entrenchment#commentsWed, 11 Nov 2015 23:37:26 +0000http://benjaminkerensa.com/?p=3088Let’s bring some change to the Community Council. A few of those running for Community Council have been on the council for years and not given up their seat to allow new ideas and fresh leadership to come to the council.
I think this is bad not only in governance of open source projects, but in leadership of any body whether it be a nonprofit board, a city council, a parliament, or congress.

At least two of the most senior people, in terms of how long they have been on community council, are in my opinion also the most disconnected and least communicative with the community, with one of them not having contributed to Ubuntu outside of their council role in years.

I think it is time to shake things up and that is why I am prioritizing my vote for the following four people as top picks and I’d encourage you to use your vote however you want but please consider shaking it up and bringing in some new faces.

TL;DR We know entrenchment in community leadership, nonprofit boards and politics is generally bad so lets shake it up!

Update: Charles Profitt a member of the Ubuntu CC who is departing emailed me this blog post he did last month which aligns with my opinion on entrenchment and dynamic not static leadership.

]]>http://benjaminkerensa.com/2015/11/11/lets-end-the-community-council-entrenchment/feed163088Help Us #SaveWiFihttp://benjaminkerensa.com/2015/09/04/savewifi
http://benjaminkerensa.com/2015/09/04/savewifi#commentsFri, 04 Sep 2015 11:06:52 +0000http://benjaminkerensa.com/?p=3070Maybe you have not heard, but the Federal Communications Commission is currently considering a proposal which would allow the agency to regulate device manufacturers and make them lock down certain wireless devices such as routers.

This is not good news because if passed, this means OEM’s could prevent users from flashing free and open source firmwares like OpenWRT or other custom firmwares on to hardware they purchase. This is not very consumer friendly and not to mention router OEM’s like Cisco, Linksys, Belkin, Asus, Buffalo, and others are not that great about updating the internals of their firmware and sometimes leave users with firmware that exposes them to security vulnerabilities.

I wanted to write something short and encourage folks to please go and comment here. If this proposal passes, it could have an international impact unless OEM’s decided to ship a U.S. version and International version of their routers which is very unlikely.

]]>http://benjaminkerensa.com/2015/09/04/savewifi/feed53070Update on Glucosiohttp://benjaminkerensa.com/2015/09/04/update-on-glucosio
Fri, 04 Sep 2015 11:02:27 +0000http://benjaminkerensa.com/?p=3069Glucosio is an open source project I founded recently. I blogged about the kick off here. I wanted to give an update as the project is moving forward better than I had imagined.

Development

We are currently aiming for our Glucosio for Android Alpha release this month with a tentative release date on September 20th, 2015. This being our Alpha and our first public release will be the base of the app. It will have basic functions but the more advance features on our roadmap will be distributed across subsequent releases and I’m sure we will keep coming up with innovative ideas as we research the needs of people with diabetes. Hat tip to Paolo, Ahmar, Satyajit and Elio who have been working tirelessly on this release.

Translations

I’m happy to report that Glucosio is already translated into 13 languages. More specifically: Albanian, Arabic, Bengali, Bengali (India), Breton, Bulgarian, Chinese Simplified, German, Italian, Spanish, Spanish (Venezuela), and Spanish (Mexico). We plan to have Greek, Japanese, Vietnamese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Hindi before launch. (Want to translate these for us? Check here.) Translations are really important to this project because every language we can offer is a population of people we can reach with our app seeing as diabetes is a global problem. The more people we reach worldwide, the more we can offer great tools to and the more opt-ins to share anonymous trends and demographic data with diabetes researchers we can get. Hat tip to Arturo who is leading our l10n efforts!

iOS

We are still actively looking for a lead iOS Developer or even two people contributing part-time on our Glucosio for iOS product. If you know someone, tell them to ping me!

HTML5 App (Firefox OS, Ubuntu Phone and Tizen)

This is sitting in our backburner but it is definitely within the scope of our vision and will help us reach platforms like Firefox OS, Ubuntu Phone and Tizen. We initially looked at doing cross-platform development but realized we could give a better experience if we built individual apps for Android and iOS.

Funding

Currently, this project has been very low cost thanks to some great supporters. Other than that, I have bootstrapped any costs, which again have been very small. We have decided from the start of this project that we do not want to monetize our apps because we feel it will dilute our vision and goals for the project. That being said, maybe the team will look into donations, crowdfunding or other options in the future if it becomes necessary. We are also looking into becoming a SPI (Software in the Public Interest) associated project so we will have a financial home and some resources available to us.

What’s next?

We are just going to be focusing for the next few weeks on getting this Alpha out the door. That includes wrapping up translations, doing some internal testing, and making sure we get out a crisp Alpha (that happens right?). Then we will sit down and discuss next things we want to prioritize and have a release post-mortem to improve our next cycle.

How you can help?

We have a really great team of people and would love to have more help. It has so far helped for us to have lots of hands in the pot and allowed us to scale as a project and get a lot of work done in a very short amount of time. If you are interested in contributing, hit us up at hello [AT] glucosio.org or ping us on Twitter at @GlucosioApp. We have contribution areas to include Development (iOS/Android/HTML5), l10n, Marketing, QA, and more. Hopefully by our Beta release, we will have some crisp documentation on our wiki on how to get started on all of these pathways!